Data Laundering Border Violence: Performance Measures and Immigration Enforcement

Abstract

On July 8, 2020, the Office of the Auditor General of Canada (OAG) tabled its report on immigration removals, finding that the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) fails to enforce deportations in a timely manner and has abysmal record-keeping practices. The report concludes that these failings undermine the integrity of Canada’s immigration system and endangers the public. Critical Accounting scholarship problematizes auditing for legitimizing harmful processes through the guise of scrutiny. The OAG audit of the CBSA overlooks the well-documented systemic abuses of the CBSA in administering migrant detention. The article argues “performance audits” are a governmental technology called data laundering that rationalizes the violence inherent in immigration enforcement. Data laundering obscures the fact that policing migration depends on broad discretionary powers, leading to opaque and inconsistent data practices. “Laundering” signals auditing’s inability to be sufficiently adversarial with a sector of law enforcement whose poor data-keeping practices maintains an illusion of recordkeeping as a form of power. Audit dependence on quantitative forms of data increases violence against immigrants; when violent deportation and detention measures are quantified, this presumes an acceptable ledger of force that accounts for, and in so doing legitimizes, state enactment of violence upon vulnerable people.

Keywords:

• Abolition
• audits
• auditing
• incarceration
• migration

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Alison Jones, Nicholas Langdon, and Phil Henderson for valuable comments on previous drafts. I am also indebted to the anonymous peer reviewers and editors whose thoughtful engagement helped tremendously to improve the piece.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 While beyond the scope of this article to review every OAG audit, examples on their website oag-bvg.gc.ca reports on the following: 2003 “Ch. 5 – Immigration Enforcement;” in 2007 “Ch. 7 – Detention and Removal of Individuals;” in 2009 “Ch. 2 – Selecting Foreign Workers Under the Immigration Program;” in “2011 Ch. 2 – Issuing Visas;” in “2016 Report 2 – Detecting and Preventing Fraud in the Citizenship Program,” in 2019 “Report 2 – Processing of Asylum Claims;” and in “2020 Spring – Immigration Removals.”

2 Canadian police services collaborate with the CBSA who lack the powers to detain and search individuals unless executing a removal or detention warrant against an identified individual (Moffette, 2022). Local police conduct unofficial border enforcement scoops by carrying out checks to ascertain identity for input to CBSA’s warrant database (Moffette, and Ridgley, 2018). The baseline structure is that policing is federal and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is the most encompassing. Provinces, and by extension cities that fall under their jurisdiction, have the right to carve out their own forces if they wish, however, it is top-down policing as opposed to bottom-up as characterizes US policing (Hudson, 2021).

3 Crimmigration refers to employing the criminal justice system and/or methods to punish and brutalize often impoverished, marginalized, and racialized asylum seekers, irregular migrants, and/or undocumented people (Abji, 2020). Crimmigration relies on xenophobic fearmongering and harmful narratives of immigrants as dangerous and threating to public safety (Zyfi and Macklin, 2022).